{science} – Page 22 – { feuilleton }

UFO zines

Or close encounters of the graphic kind. The fanzine concept has never been limited to the music world. Any niche interest with a large enough group of adherents can support the existence of amateur publications, not least in the esoteric realms of Forteana (Fortean Times itself began life as an amateur publication in the 1960s) and UFOlogy. The Internet Archive has a sub-archive, UFO Newsletters from the Archives For the Unexplained, which contains over 10,000 items dating back to the 1950s. As with crank books, the cover designs interest me much more than the contents which tend to be the pre-digital zine default of page after page of single-spaced typewriter text, plus the occasional grainy photograph.

Despite their amateur status, many of the cover designs seem to be the work of aspiring or actual graphic designers, frequently showing more finesse than you’d find on the cover of a music or genre fiction zine of the same period. I like the way many of these covers are modelled on the design of scientific journals but with the added frisson of outlandish headlines and pictures of flying saucers in all shapes and sizes. (George Adamski’s clunky “chicken brooder” spacecraft is a common feature of the early publications.)

The last three images in this post are from Fonts In Use, and are included here as superior examples of the form.

Continue reading “UFO zines”

Weekend links 600

My kind of window. From a collection of machine-learning images by Unlimited Dream Co. Via Bruce Sterling.

• “I will never call myself a queer. That word is one of the things that I detest that has happened, and it’s almost being forced now. For me, you cannot separate that word from the hatred and violence that once accompanied it. When I read it being used in The New York Times, I think, ‘It’s their word and they can fucking have it all they want.’ I will never use ‘queer.’ It’s an ugly word.” John Rechy, still active at the age of 90, talking to Jeff Weiss about hustling, social opprobrium, and his pioneering books.

• “At a time when we are being constantly told that humanity is destroying the planet, it is somehow comforting to see nature not merely outlasting, but triumphing over humanity’s constructions—as nature does in many of Piranesi’s Views of Rome.” Alasdair Palmer on Piranesi’s peerless renderings of Roman ruins.

• “The magical aspect of Get Back is its total refusal to adhere to the standard tropes of music documentaries. There are no talking heads commenting on the Beatles’ greatness, no continual barrage of quick edits and highlights.” Geeta Dayal on Peter Jackson’s resurrection of the Fab Four.

But men are not traditionally meant to be objects of art. “Men look at women,” John Berger wrote. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” When men look at men, however, they break rules. “I didn’t set out to be radical,” says Miller. “But I was at a fair and I had a huge nude on a stand by Michael Leonard. I’d only been open ten minutes and a woman started having a go and saying it’s filth. What I found fascinating is she’d walked past a whole span of female nudes. I think society is just immune to female nudity. People don’t see it. If you take this to the straight world of an art fair, it provokes reactions other dealers don’t get. There isn’t anyone else like me.”

Tony Wilkes talks to Henry Miller, owner of an art gallery devoted to the male form

• “I imagine men with starched collars, horrified by an animal with no hard edges to grab onto, no solidity to venerate. Something low, lateral, creeping.” Fiona Glen on “Devil Fish”, Cthulhu and cephalomania.

• I like glowing things so Brian Eno’s glowing record turntable has an immediate appeal. A shame it’s a very limited production which is almost certainly sold out by now.

• The next release on the Ghost Box label will be A Letter from TreeTops by Pneumatic Tubes.

• At Dangerous Minds: A Sight for Sore Eyes Vol. 1, a visual history of The Residents.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the supernatural thrillers of Archie Roy.

• Mix of the week: A reflection on 2021 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• Swan River Press looks back over a year of book production.

• New music: Spherical Harmonics by Joseph Hyde.

• Octopus’s Garden (1969) by The Beatles | The Kraken (2006) by Hans Zimmer | Kraken (2017) by Dave Clarkson

Weekend links 598

The Wire, July 2004. Illustration and design by Non-Format. Christopher Cox’s interview with Lucier is available to read here.

• “I went into experimental overdrive. Lyrical motifs became literal imagery. A hammer shattering a plate of glass. A lyrical maze of geometric tunnels and formations.” Chris Mosdell talking to Aquarium Drunkard about writing lyrics for Yellow Magic Orchestra and others (you can hear his voice on YMO’s Citizens Of Science), plus the recording of his own debut album, Equasian.

• At Public Domain Review: “…this short, odd book confronts a question that has vexed naturalists for thousands of years: how do we account for the precipitation of animals?” Odd Showers; or, An Explanation of the Rain of Insects, Fishes, and Lizards (1870) by George Duncan Gibb.

• “…few writers on our list could have functioned in the culture that, today, sees literature as a profession for which you prepare like any other: going to the right school, meeting the right people.” Francine Prose on her encounters with the literary strange.

• “Where was glass first fashioned? How was it worked and coloured, and passed around the ancient world?” Carolyn Wilke presents a brief scientific history of glass.

• RIP Antony Sher and Alvin Lucier. In 1969 Lucier was sitting in a room different to the one you are in now. Elsewhere: Alvin Lucier at Ubuweb.

• New/old music: Zeitgeist: Ambient Music from 2012 to 2020 by Marco Simioni & Mattia Saviolo.

• James Balmont on five unmissable films from the Japanese New Wave movement.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Illuminated paintings of Tokyo after dark by Keita Morimoto.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 724 by Laura BCR, and Isolatedmix 115 by HVL.

• At Strange Flowers: part two of James Conway’s Secret Satan end-of-year list.

• “Jony Ive’s first major design since leaving Apple isn’t what you’d expect.”

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Yasuzo Masumura Day.

• Glass (1968) by Sagittarius | Glass (1979) by Joy Division | Glass (2009) by Bat For Lashes

Weekend links 597

Untitled art by Toshio Okazaki from JCA Annual 5, 1984.

• “Yeah, when I first started writing it, nobody knew what to call it at all. I mean, the publishers didn’t know what to call it. They thought that Tolkien was (writing about) a post-apocalyptic nuclear world. That’s the only way they could perceive an alternate world, in other words. And it was the same with Mervyn Peake… they’re all interpreted that way. The idea of putting ‘fantasy’ on a book meant usually meant that it was a children’s book. And if you put fantasy as the genre, they usually put ‘SF’ larger than ‘fantasy’ to show that it was what it was.” Michael Moorcock (again) talking to Derek Garcia about fiction, games, and (of course) Elric.

• “Non-payment, low payment, late payment and promises of jam tomorrow, or at some unspecified future date, bedevil the freelance life as they did five centuries ago.” Indeed. Boyd Tonkin on Albrecht Dürer, patron saint of stroppy freelancers.

• “All at once, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is tender, outrageous and daft.” Patrick Clarke compiles an oral history of Soft Cell’s debut album.

Yeah, it was kind of a media hype. In January [1967], the media said, [breathless] ‘Oh my god, San Francisco is the place to be. Come to San Francisco, wear flowers in your hair.’ So we had a meeting of the people in the Haight-Ashbury about how we were going to deal with so many people coming. The Diggers decided to kind of make it a university of the streets, an alternative anarchist culture.

We knew that all these people were coming to San Francisco, and we knew they weren’t going to stay. And we thought, well, the best thing we could do would be to kind of educate them about the kinds of things that are possible in society, and then let them go back to where they’re from, and they would carry these ideas. And that is what happened. We were quite successful in that.

Judy Goldhaft of the San Francisco Diggers talking to Jay Babcock for another installment of Jay’s verbal history of the hippie anarchists

• “What ‘impossible’ meant to Richard Feynman; what I learned when I challenged the legendary physicist,” by Paul J. Steinhardt.

• At Strange Flowers: part one of James Conway’s essential end-of-year shopping list, Secret Satan.

• Mixes of the week: Part II and Part III of the three-part At The Outer Marker series by David Colohan.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Olivia Duval presents…Suave: A History of Les Disques du Crépuscule.

• Mystery and Truth of the Cthulhu Myth, a Japanese guide to the Cthulhu Mythos.

• Intimacy, Loss and Hope: Inside Florian Hetz’s beautiful 2020 photo diary.

• New music: The Tower (The City) by Vanessa Rossetto/Lionel Marchetti.

• Nite Jewel’s favourite albums.

• RIP Stephen Sondheim.

• Nothing Is Impossible (1974) by The Interns | Mission Impossible Theme (1981) by Ippu-Do | Impossible Guitar (1982) by Phil Manzanera

Weekend links 595

Dig the eldritch letterforms, man. Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley making the High Sign on the cover of Les Baxter’s soundtrack album, 1970. That gesture, incidentally, goes back a long way.

• If you have an abundance of interstellar credits burning a hole in your stillsuit then you may be interested in bidding for the original of the book commonly known as The Dune Bible, the complete set of storyboards by Jean “Moebius” Giraud, together with designs by other artists for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abandoned feature film. I keep hoping someone might turn this into an animated feature, something like René Laloux’s Time Masters but on a grander scale and with better animation (hello, Japan). 46 pages of scans from a limited printing of the book may be seen here.

• RIP Dean Stockwell. His 1995 interview in Psychotronic Video magazine is much better value than any potted biography.

• Bed-hopping, martinis and self-loathing: Emma Brockes on Patricia Highsmith’s unpublished diaries.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tracing the footsteps of travelling Ukiyoe artist Kawase Hasui.

• Culture.pl examines the theoretical revolution of Nicolaus Copernicus.

• Killian Fox on the cover designs for Penguin’s Modern Classics.

• Nick Mamatas on his favourite genre-breaking mysteries.

• New music: HYbr:ID oval p-dance by Alva Noto.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 114 by R.A.D.E.

• Justin Robertson’s favourite music.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Clock.

• Jay Babcock at Substack.

• The Clock (1968) by Ruth White | Clock Factory (1993) by The Sabres Of Paradise | Internal Clock (2009) by Monolake